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About

Janeen Pergrin Rastall

With beads I pray, whisper to Vincenzo Grossi, Maria Romero, all the novice saints. I beg for fear to fall away – the clatter of unlocked shackles like the child lost in a crowd pressing toward a subway door, who reaches up to grasp any stranger’s empty hand.

Purls for Jo

after Tomas Tranströmer

3 A.M. Night nestles on the porch railings. The wind has stopped knocking. Across the bay, street lights stitch together Marquette’s alleyways.

As when a woman casts on her knots of grief, weaves in loose ends, draws from friends. Her needles pierce each empty space and she purls the darkness.

And when that woman falls into an illness
so deep you want to make a nest, cushion her, unravel the layettes, the mohair scarves and socks, to tug across the past, gather back her years of gleaming threads.

Secrets on the Way

after Tomas Tranströmer

Crows shout by the window sashes. Light licks the edge of the blind, flicks over the hollows below her eyes. Still, she sleeps and dreams how bears unfurl, how claws scar every sill and jamb.

Her days roil, unbound –– dissonance in the core of a cumulus.

When you tell her the past is a room that containsevery moment, she unlocks her parlor. Potted plants guard the door, a smothering of hothouse flowers, caskets flung open, the wake already underway.

After the Attack

the examination room makes her shiver. All the Woman’s Daycover girls smile up with plump lips from a basket beside the bed. She concentrates on how the paper sheet crackles when her calves quiver, how her thigh bruises blend into the gown’s periwinkled hem. When the doctor presses open her legs, she clutches the bed rails, above her shoulder, a landscape: blue skies, field shimmers. Sheaves of wheat graze rays of light. Among the crops, a dark aisle grows. A man slices a furrow beyond the mat, the frame. Only she can hear the swing of his blade.

Caprichos No. 43—The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

after Goya

Unable to sleep, a woman sweeps feathers off her stoop, gathers pellets beneath the pine boughs. She claims as talismans: a little mouse gristle, the skeletons of shrews, what the owl could not digest.

Bats arc and dive past her uncovered head. A fence of wings cannot bar her neighbor. She thinks she hears his horses. Their hooves tap for weakness along the stable wall.

By lamplight, she stuffs newspapers where the wind gropes. There are rings, lids, jars to scrub, berries to preserve before dawn reddens every cornice of the house next door.

Janeen Pergrin Rastall lives in Gordon, MI (population 2). She is the author of In the Yellowed House (dancing girl press 2014) and co-author of Heart Radicals (ELJ Publications, 2016). Her chapbook Objects May Appear Closer won the 2015 Celery City Chapbook Contest. Her work has been twice nominated for a Best of the Net Award and for the Pushcart Prize.

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